UChile HomeBreakers 2008 Team Description Paper

The UChile HomeBreakers team has a strong interest in participating in the RoboCup 2008 @Home League competition. As a team with expertise in robot vision, object recognition, and human-robot interaction, we believe that we can provide interesting features to the league, such as: general-purpose object recognition, face analysis tools, human-robot interfaces, and robust self- localization. This year we have important improvements in our service robot. Among them: (i) improved electronic and mechanicals components of our Magellan iRobot mobile platform, (ii) a new arm design, which includes a 3 finger-hand. Each finger has 2 DOF, (iii) a hardware for determining the spatial origin of the dominant speech source, (iv) a new robot head (still under construction), (v) a new face recognition module, and (vi) a robust and real-time hand gesture detection and recognition module for dynamic environments. It is also worth to mentioned that our robot has been used for educational purposes with school children and as referee of robot soccer games.